Elon Musk and testing as if your life depended on it

SpaceX founder Elon Musk says you learn more from success than failure. When it comes to manned spaceflight, we beg to differ.

WASHINGTON – A panel of entrepreneurs was asked during a recent technology panel whether they learned more from failure or success?

Two panelists were unequivocal, emphasizing that failure was the best teacher. The third, space entrepreneur, Tesla co-founder and PayPal originator Elon Musk, said he sees it differently. Success is the greatest teacher, asserted Musk, explaining that success allows the risk taker to “find the needle in the haystack.”

As head of the only commercial space company, Space Exploration Technologies Corp., or SpaceX, to send a spacecraft into orbit and return it to Earth in one piece, Musk can afford to be a bit cocky. The next challenge will be sending his Dragon spacecraft into orbit to dock with the International Space Station. The launch aboard SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket has been delayed several times, and the company said Wednesday (May 2) that a scheduled May 7 launch attempt has been scrubbed to allow NASA and SpaceX to continue testing and verifying spacecraft software.

The successful Elon Musk says failure is overrated.

Musk said his critics told him the chances for success with Tesla and SpaceX were “zero.” He puts SpaceX’s chances of success as high as 40 percent. That includes hauling cargo to the space station and eventually carrying astronauts into orbit. SpaceX also has contracts to launch satellites.

Musk argued that he likes his chances of succeeding if only because “there are no prior precedents for success in creating an orbital space company, really, or a new car company in the last 90 years.”

That may be true for a car company, but space is an entirely different matter.

The history of manned spaceflight argues against Musk’s assertion that success teaches us more than failure. The 1960s newsreels showing a seemingly endless series of rocket explosions at Cape Canaveral underscore how much rocket scientists had to learn through testing before they could risk putting a human on top of what amounts to a controlled explosion. We would not have reached the moon if Wernher von Braun and his rocketeers in Huntsville, Alabama, hadn’t stress-tested their rockets until they failed.

It is at the critical point of failure where the engineering lessons are found.

Musk thinks otherwise. He will hopefully view the matter of testing differently when lives are on the line. As commercial space critic and curmudgeon John Pike told us last fall, Musk “hasn’t blown up enough hardware” and SpaceX has been “plagued by random success.”

Testing until something fails, whether it’s a widget or a rocket, is the fastest way to succeed. Success can be found in the hard lessons of failure.

We would have liked to have asked Musk more about this, and put to him the fundamental question: What happens to the commercial space industry when someone is eventually killed? Such a question deserves a response from the likes of Musk, but he quickly ducked out of the panel session and exited the building by the nearest escalator.

Here's what "Rocket Boy" Homer Hickam had to say about the early days of rocket testing at what became NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.: At Huntsville, “they had the solid example of the German rocket scientists who were extremely practical guys. They didn’t believe in flying anything until they tested it until failure. They would run [rocket engines] until they blew up. And they knew exactly the parameters within [which] these engines worked, and what was fragile and what wasn’t and what needed to be beefed up and what didn’t. As versus today, they test it on a computer and they don’t really know. You plug in a bunch of numbers, but you don’t really know.”

Elon Musk is a remarkable man with a remarkable career behind him which continues to surprise us all. That said, I would take issue with the comment that "there are no prior precedents for success in creating an orbital space company, really". Actually from the earliest rocket launches, many countries have started up successful space launch programs. Most of these programs have a combination of government funding and private enterprise engineering effort. The evolutionary process continues.

This phrase is really key in my mind: "It is at the critical point of failure where the engineering lessons are found." I suspect that many people think of failure in terms of forgetting to tighten a bolt. In general, that sort of failure just tells you that you have poor workmanship and poor quality control.
The most useful type of failure comes from pushing a design well past its limits and seeing wear those limits are, or ensuring that the are far enough above the safety margin. When I hop on a Boeing 777, I don't want to know that the engineers designed it to withstand 150% of the maximum predicted load. I want to know that they stressed it until it failed and that the failure was passed the 150% design strength.
If the wing doesn't pass, then you get to see where and how it will likely fail and you can address that area. If it passes, then you've learned that it is as strong as you want it to be.

The latest on SpaceX launch to the International Space Station: NASA says the new launch date for the oft-delayed flight of the SpaceX Dragon cargo ship to the space station is now scheduled for May 19. Presumably, SpaceX engineers are still testing and verifying spacecraft software.

I of course was referring to the Dragon spacecraft, not the entire Falcon 9 stack.
We are also aware that there are many other commercial space companies that receive less attention than SpaceX. We have written about them here:
http://confidential.eetimes.com/business-models/4229640/From-Chip-Guy-to-Rocket-Man
and here:
http://www.eetimes.com/electronics-news/4219195/Image-gallery--Aerospace-tech-in-the-desert

As an engineering website, we can widen out the question: and it comes down to the unglamorous arena of Testing.
Testing is where science meets engineering, and because of that you learn more from failure.
When your widget passes its stress test, you haven't learned what you need to know, which is how much lighter or cheaper you could make it. That saving could then be diverted into improving the weakest link in the system elsewhere.
Pushing test out to after launch, whether literally or not, is dumb and irresponsible engineering and bad science, no least because you can't instrument a disaster properly and you certainly can't repeat it at will.
When it fails you will have discovered what the margin of safety might be.
Testing is scientific research at its finest.
No-one said it isn't exciting flying by the seat of your pants, sure, and there are plenty of barnstormers who can't believe they are being paid to take risks
as test pilots. But no-one gives them passengers when they take up a new craft to plot its flight envelope.
'You never learn anything by being right'